SOURCE: “An Approach to Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence,” in African Literature Today: 10 Retrospect & Prospect, Africana Publishing Company, 1979, pp. 124- 33.

[In the following essay, Ohaegbu examines Ouologuem's use of violence to show different aspects of human nature.]

A lot has been said about the controversial Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, and his novel Le Devoir de Violence translated in English as Bound to Violence.¹ But much of the argument tends more to generate heat than to shed light on the author's literary intentions and his vision of the world.

There is no doubt that Ouologuem's book is one of the best-written and most audacious novels that have ever emerged from post-independence Africa; it can even be said to be a shocker to the ‘outward-looking’ literary orthodoxy of pre-independence African writers in French. African readers and critics look at the book with rather unpleasant surprise, while some racially minded literary critics and reviewers of Europe and America easily succumb to the temptation of regarding it as the greatest blow that has ever been dealt to African life, tradition, and values by an African writer. It is the intention of this article to throw more light on the study of this novel by touching on some vital aspects of the book.

According to Hubert de Leusse,² Ouologuem is out to destroy a ‘certain fictitious and idyllic image of Africa’ presented by African writers and ethnologists. Considering the wave of violence which runs across the entire novel, this critic comes to the conclusion that ‘Africa is in reality a land where violence is equalled only by the dread it called forth'—merely pushing the author's argument too far! Yves Benot³ remarks that Ouologuem is a ‘nonconformist’ writer who does not believe that Africa had been oppressed and subjugated by colonization, and he goes further to say that ‘this is a consoling and comforting book’ to the French reading public. Obviously these critics imply that the reason behind the overwhelming acclamation of Bound to Violence by many Western critics, and their unanimity on the ‘high quality’ of the novel, is its attempt to destroy the image of Africa.

It appears to me that most critics are so carried away by the blanket of violence with which Ouologuem covers his Nakem Empire that they tend to miss the over-riding message of the author—that man (not necessarily the black man!) has a violent nature which can be utilized to establish, sustain, and perpetuate political domination of a people. Gerald Moore has correctly remarked that

Saif is offered as typical of oppression by which the ‘notables’ have always governed Africa; a system which, having survived the French conquest and the implantation of modern education, now hopes to manipulate even the nominal independence of Nakem to its advantage.⁴

To get this point across, the author has chosen some sensitive moments of the black man's history—feudalism, Arab invasion, slavery, colonization—which he exploits and manipulates to conform to his violent vision of the world. If this central theme is accepted, it has to be said then that the African reading public is only worried over the rather unsympathetically distorted, and of course ‘unorthodox', use which Ouologuem has made of African history and material to prove his case. Why must the author use his own continent and people to create the hideous image of man? Does he feel so comfortable and safe in his borrowed garment of white civilization that he negates his past and forgets his own alienation? These are two of the questions which the uninitiated reader of Bound to Violence is prone to ask. But the subtleties of the novel have yet to be completely realized before full justice can be done to the book and its author.

It is true that Ouologuem is a hard-liner in his novel, but it has to be recognized that he works with a double-edged axe which spares neither the black man, nor the Western world, some of whose critics claim the novelist on their side. In fact one has to read in between the lines in order to understand that Ouologuem treats with equal contempt his Nakem Empire and the doomed colonial empire which the French had wanted to create in West Africa.

The story opens in a lachrymose and touching tone which indicates the subject matter, the time, and space of the novel:

Our eyes drink the brightness of the sun and, overcome, marvel at their tears. Machallah! wa bismillah! … To recount the bloody adventure of the niggertrash—shame to the worthless paupers!—there would be no need to go back beyond the present century; but the true history of the Blacks begins much earlier, with the Saifs, in the year 1202 of our era, in the African Empire of Nakem south of Fezzan, long after the conquests of Okba ben Nafi al-Fitri …

(p. 3)

As one can see right from the beginning of the novel, part of the grand design of Ouologuem is to show how the ruling Moslem dynasty in the Nakem Empire has, from 1202 to 1947, consistently used violence and intimidation to control the destiny of the common man, referred to in the book as ‘niggertrash’ and ‘pauper’. He is more concerned about the ‘bloody adventure of the niggertrash’ and the victimizer than with the so-called primitivism and barbarism of mediaeval Africa often harped on by critics.

Ouologuem's black man is synonymous with suffering and resignation; he is the ‘worthless paupers', dehumanized and exploited for centuries by the Saifs and Arab notables, ‘clubbed, sold, stockpiled, haggled over, adjudicated, flogged, bound and delivered—with attentive, studied, sorrowful contempt—to the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Arabs (on the east and north coasts), and to French, Dutch, and English (west coast), and so scattered to the winds …’ (p. 12). When French colonization came, it was the same ‘niggertrash’ who had to be victimized. For Ouologuem, both the black man and the white man have their share of the blame for the slave trade which depopulated Africa. Although he attacks the feudal system and its corollary, slavery, he does not seek to show that violence and oppression are consubstantial with the African; he rather attributes them to what can be called the general degeneration of the human kind of which the black man is only a part.

The mediaeval Nakem Empire which is the main theatre of action is supposedly located in western Sudan:

The fame of that Empire spread to Morocco, the Sudan, Egypt, Abyssinia, and to the holy and noble city of Mecca; it was known to the English, the Dutch, the French, the Spaniards, and, it goes without saying, the Portuguese …

(p. 3).

There is a strong temptation among critics to associate it with the Mali Empire of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. In fact nothing in the novel suggests that the Saifs who are of Arabo-Jewish origin are descendants of the ancient kingdom of Mali, nor can the ‘well-beloved Isaac al-Heit', founder of the Nakem Empire and of the Saif dynasty, be compared to Sundjata, the great hero of the Mandingue epic so well celebrated by the famous historian Djibril Tamsi Niane of Mali. It is true that the author of Bound to Violence is a Malian and that he may have drawn from his experiences in his society to weave the intricate story of his novel, but this does not necessarily mean that this gruesome story of violence which he is telling is that of his country and people from 1202 to 1947 and even after; nor can it be said to be really and exclusively that of Africa. As Professor E. N. Obiechina has well remarked: ‘Africa there certainly is in the novel, but so also are Arabia and the Orient, France and Europe. To ignore this fact is to do less than justice to the novel and pander to age-old mystifications.’⁵

One fact which readers and critics of Ouologuem's book have to admit is that the writer, as an artist, is a universal observer whose experiences and imagination cannot be limited to a definite geographical area with mathematical accuracy. In this regard Ouologuem himself has been reported to have said that his searching and critical eyes extend to ‘Africa of the great empires, the Congo and ex-anglo-egyptian Sudan', and that he has equally borne in mind Delafosse's account of the descendants of the Queen of Saba.⁶

Two great periods of violence are easily discernible in the novel. The first is the mediaeval period masterminded by the Saif dynasty with the complicity of the notables. Here violence is essentially associated with the feudal cruelties of the overlords on their innocent and ‘bastardized’ subjects who were often captives of war.

In that age of feudalism, large communities of slaves celebrated the justice of their overlords by forced labor and by looking on inert as multitudes of their brothers, smeared with the blood of butchered children and of disemboweled expectant mothers, were immured alive … That is what happened at Tillaberi-Bentia, at Granta, at Groaso, at Gagol-Gosso, and in many places mentioned in the Tarik al-Fetach and at the Tarik al-Sudan of the Arab historians …

(p. 4)

In trying to trace and deplore what he calls ‘the bloody adventure of the niggertrash', Ouologuem calls to mind the atrocities of the feudal system in which the overlord arrogated to himself the right of life and death over his slaves. His argument is that ‘forced labour', ‘slavery', and the destruction of life and property which some African historians and politicians have often blamed on the advent of the white man in Africa already existed in ‘the African Empire of Nakem south of Fezzan.’ This reasoning leads the author to go to the extreme assertion that the French colonization of the Nakem Empire was in reality the ‘beginning of decolonization’:

But to Nakem the colonial powers came too late, for with the help of the local notables a colonial overlord had established himself long since, and that colonial overlord was none other than Saif. All unsuspecting, the European conquerors played into his hands. Call it technical assistance …

(p. 24)

Although Ouologuem is quoted as saying: ‘My aim is to do violence to the misconceptions of Africans so that we can see what the real problems are',⁷ he seems to have retouched the problems to the point of unreality; his posture baffles those who know the reality and gives a measure of comfort and psychological satisfaction to the exponents of the mission civilisatrice.

An aspect of this mediaeval violence which has become a duty in Ouologuem's Nakem Empire relates to what the author describes as ‘internecine rivalries and warring with one another for the imperial power …’ (p. 4). This type of violence persisted in the Nakem Empire and was about to result in a total disintegration of the empire and the people when French colonizers arrived and constituted a threat to the power of Saif and the notables who now ‘diplomatically’ became great nationalists and freedom fighters.

The second period of violence in the book covers the entire colonial occupation of Nakem up to 1947, the date of the first elections. In this part the author takes delight in offering us what really looks like a fight between two giants over the political control of the Nakem Empire; we have on the one hand the wicked Saif Ben Isaac al-Heit applying all the diabolical means at his disposal (fire, poison, assassination, asps, tricks, intimidation, etc.) to preserve his authority over Nakem; on the other hand the colonial administrators stand firm using the force of arms and also poison to eliminate Saif who constitutes a big obstacle to the effective installation of the colonial regime.

It is important to note that in both the mediaeval and colonial periods power and politics generate the violence which articulates the entire internal movement of the novel. In all cases the permanent victim is the people of Nakem—the niggertrash—whom Ouologuem presents as ignorant of their destiny and incapable of a veritable revolt, since centuries of unbroken servitude have transformed them into ‘Zombies’.

This web of violence entangles not only the Saifs and their murderous agents, not only the colonial administrators who want to liberate the people of Nakem from the clutches of the Saifs and put them under a new form of domination, but it also involves Islam and Christianity which, under the cloak of spirituality, do violence to traditional art and culture.

A close study of Bound to Violence reveals three kinds of violence—physical, economic and cultural. Physical violence is a function of politics; it stems from man's irresistible urge to rule absolutely and exclusively—hence the seeming necessity to eliminate all potential threats. This explains the death of all newborn babies in the Nakem Empire under the rule of Saif Moche Gabbai of Honain:

It came to pass that one day in the year 1420 Saif Moche Gabbai of Honain—after hearing the words of a soothsayer who predicted that he would be overthrown by a child to be born during the coming year in Tillaberi—Bentia, capital of the Nakem Empire—ceased to ignore the strange cravings of pregnant women. He consigned all newborn babes to the red death and lined their shrunken heads along the wall of his antechamber …

(p. 5).

It is for the same reason that Saif al-Haram usurped the imperial throne from his brother, Saif al-Hilal, and killed him. The French colonial administrators, Chevalier and Vandame, are equally victims of politically oriented violence.

There is yet another form of violence which, though physical, does not seek to achieve any definite political end or even any objective at all. The rape of Tambira by Dougouli, Wampoulo and Kratonga, and her ultimate death in a ‘latrine built for Saif's serfs', the sexual torture of Awa by Chevalier, the tragic end of Anne Kadidia caused by ‘a sadistic customer’ who had concealed a razor blade in her washing soap, the unabashed killing of Awa by Sankolo—all these are wanton acts of cruelty which one must shudder to see in the novel. They are ‘gratuitous’ and smack of the English horror novels of the nineteenth century and the French existentialist literature, not to mention the tradition of Le Marquis de Sade, all of which Ouologuem must have read with some delight.

It may be thought that Ouologuem presents these horrible acts of violence to give a barbarous past to the black man but this would be wrong. The truth is that the author is not saying that violence is the black man's heritage. What he is trying to do is to present another aspect of man's nature, that of a human beast; his observation transcends time and space and involves the whole of humanity.

As for the economic aspect of violence, the author shows it through the depopulation of the Nakem Empire by local and foreign slave dealers, by forced labour, hunger, and disease associated with the incessant raids and inter-provincial wars in Nakem. We are told that at a time, ‘under the lash of necessity a father sold his son, a brother his brother', that ‘no villainy was too great if food might be procured by it’ (p. 14). The economic strangulation of the people, far from being historically inevitable, is merely a device for maintaining dictatorial power by forcing everyone to have ‘no other recourse but to throw themselves on the mercy of Saif …’ (p. 14).

Political domination, torture, and economic exploitation can succeed in keeping a people in a state of suffering and subjugation only for some time. The most disastrous and lasting violence is cultural, since it is capable of alienating the oppressed completely from his tradition and environment. Islam and Christianity, in complicity with the Saifs and the notables, are presented in the novel as having done great violence to the cultural personality of the ‘niggertrash', and Ouologuem makes a mockery of these religions:

The religious gymnastics of the five daily prayers of Islam were maintained as safety valve; the poor in mind and spirit were kept busy searching and striving for Allah's Eternal Kingdom. Religion, whose soul had been vomited by the clergy of Nakem, became a deliberately confused mumbling about human dignity, a learned mystification; losing its mystical contents, it became a means of action, a political weapon …

(p. 23)

In much the same way, when the white missionaries came to evangelize the Nakem Empire, Saif forced the slaves and their children to embrace Christianity, and this with a view to placating the colonizers and continuing the cultural ‘bastardization’ of the serfs:

After that Saif decided that only the sons of the servant class would be constrained to undergo French education, the masses of the missionaries, and the baptism of the White Fathers, to adopt French dress and shave their heads, while their parents would be obliged to make amends and swear secrecy …

(p. 46)

Cultural violence is again manifest in the profanation of African art, not only by Saif and the notables, but also by Shrobenius and other Western tourists who defy the magico-religious intention of this art and make it an object of international gangsterism and commercialization. It is no wonder then that Ouologuem should take Shrobenius and his like to task:

This salesman and manufacturer of ideology [Shrobenius] assumed the manner of a sphinx to impose his riddles, to satisfy his caprices and past turnabouts. And shrewd anthropologist that he was, he sold more than thirteen hundred pieces, deriving from the collection he had purchased from Saif and the carloads his disciples had obtained in Nakem free of charge, to the following purveyors of funds: The Musée de l'Homme in Paris, the museums of London, Basel, Munich, Hamburg, and New York …

(p. 95)

Although the name Shrobenius looks like a facile play on the word Frobenius, the famous German ethnographer whose works have in no small measure inspired many Africanists to study and write on African cultures and traditions, one cannot say that Ouologuem is trying to deny the contribution of Western scholarship to the knowledge of African peoples and their civilization. He is rather whipping some of the early European Africanists with whom ‘negro art found its patent of nobility in the folklore of mercantile intellectualism’ (p. 94), and who coined sensational stories about African life simply to appear as great scholars in the Western world and be raised to ‘a lofty sorbonnical chair’.

Another striking feature of Bound to Violence is its generally pessimistic vision of the world. Ouologuem contests the notion of Africa as ‘the womb of the world and the cradle of civilization’; he runs down the black man's past glories, making his present objectionable and his future rather bleak. We are overjoyed to see Raymond Spartacus Kassoumi receive the modern education necessary for the accomplishment of great things; we see him as the forerunner of a generation of young revolutionaries who would fight to end feudal oppression and free the Nakem Empire and its people from the violence to which they have been bound. But alas! Ouologuem disappoints us and dashes our hopes to pieces when he finally makes the modern educated Raymond a pawn in the hands of Saif and a ‘peace-offering’ to the colonial power—an attitude which makes a mockery of education and its importance in politicizing the oppressed masses and fortifying them against the dictatorship of feudal overlords.

Although one would have liked to see Saif nailed to the cross and finally buried and forgotten at the end of the story, Ouologuem makes him our contemporary (if not our eventual successor!), and the atrocities of his regime a recurrent phenomenon of African political history. We are appalled to learn that ‘projected into the world, one cannot help recalling that Saif, mourned three million times, is for ever reborn to history beneath the hot ashes of more than thirty African republics (pp. 181–2).

Lofty ideals like African unity are to Ouologuem a dream that can never be made a reality; the holy water of Mecca not only has a bad taste, it cannot cure the sick, contrary to the belief of Moslems; God is made a tacit collaborator of the tyrannical leaders of the Nakem Empire, since he watches with silent applause and benediction the hangman deal his fatal blows on the ‘niggertrash’. We are told that ‘man is in history, and history is politics. Politics is cleavage. No solidarity is possible. Nor purity (p. 175)’.

Ouologuem takes delight in making the characters of his novel suffer; he treats them with disrespect and verbal violence suggestive of a sadist. Apart from Saif Ben Isaac al-Heit, hero of the novel, and the good priest Henry who becomes bishop at the end of the story, all the rest of the characters find themselves invariably sunk in cruel situations where the author offers them no ray of light nor any hope of salvation; a wicked and implacable destiny seems to have ordained in advance the sufferings of the personages. There is hardly any character who does not fall under Ouologuem's crushing wheels: Tambira is raped and killed without ever seeing the fruits of her labour; her daughter, Anne, after losing her parents, is forced to become a prostitute at Pigalle where she tragically ends what has been a life of unmitigated misfortune; the French governors, Chevalier and Vandame, are massacred in cold blood, and their hopes of establishing colonial administration are frustrated.

At one time the author tells us that ‘the golden age when all the swine [the tyrants] will die is just around the corner’ (p. 174), but it is in vain that we await that golden age, since his Saif—the big swine—though disarmed by the mystic personality of Bishop Henry, remains immortal. In fact all is bad in the society which serves as the landscape of the author's literary creation. However, there is room to wonder whether this pessimism cannot be explained by the fact that he is presenting a world where human misery and oppression abound. What looks like pessimism could then be seen as an exaggerated exteriorization of Ouologuem's internal distress in the face of an endless record of man's injustice to man.

Ouologuem does not present a flattering image of man and society in his novel. Violence and oppression reign supreme and stem from the inordinate ambition of the ruling classes to relegate God to the background and perpetuate their rule of terror over their subjects. His book is not aimed at the glorification of the black man's past, nor at the dismantling of the foundations of his people's civilization. To fully understand him, one has to insert his novel into the context of the general feeling of disillusionment which, as Wole Soyinka, the famous Nigerian playwright and critic, remarked at the conference of African writers in Stockholm (1967), characterizes the present stage of African life. In this regard, it can be said that Ouologuem is not less ‘committed’ than his predecessors (Mongo Beti, Ferdinand Oyono, Bernard Dadie, etc.) who have unequivocally denounced colonial oppression. But the difference is that his own commitment is more internally oriented, and therefore more critical of the African himself than of the white man who has hitherto appeared in the African novel as the black man's permanent oppressor. Indeed, the use he has made of ‘The Legend of the Saifs’ in the first chapter of his novel is to establish a background of horrors and dictatorships against which one can understand the dynamics of power in contemporary Africa. He may have sinned by exaggeration and distortion of facts noticeable here and there in his book, but his thesis cannot be treated as outright fallacy, especially when one takes a dispassionate account of dictatorships and militarisms decimating the population and qualified manpower of some present-day African countries.

Notes

1. This novel has been translated into English. For the purpose of this article the citations and page references are drawn from Bound to Violence, translated from the French by Ralph Mannheim and published in London by Heinemann (AWS 99), 1971. New York, Humanities, 1976.

2. Hubert de Leusse, Afrique et occident. Heurs et malheurs d'une rencontre. Les romanciers du pays noir, Paris, Orante, 1971, p. 88.

3. Yves Benot, ‘Le Devoir de Violence de Yambo Ouologuem, est-il un chef-d'oeuvre ou une mystification?’, La Pénsee. Revue du racialisme moderne, Paris, 149, 1970, 128.

4. Gerald Moore, ‘The Debate on Existence in African Literature', Présence Africaine, 81, 1972, 25.

5. E. N. Obiechina, ‘Bound to Violence’ (review), Okike. An African Journal of New Writing, I, 3, 1972, 53.

6. Cf. Philippe Decraene's review of Le Devoir de Violence in Le Monde, 12 October 1968, 1.

7. Cf. West Africa, 2689, 14 December 1968, 1474–5.